Chapter 4: JESUS

54) Why does Jesus repeatedly say
in A Course in Miracles that I need to forgive him? What for?

For many students of A Course in
Miracles this is a problematic issue. Why, they ask, do I have to forgive
Jesus; I am not angry at him. I (Gloria) remember many years ago when I
had my own group that met to discuss the Course. This issue was almost
responsible for World War III breaking out in my dining room, where the
group met every week. It was certainly not a neutral topic, and forgiving
Jesus is indeed a central issue that goes to the heart of the Course's
teaching about undoing the ego thought system. Let us begin our answer
by looking at some representative passages from the Course where Jesus
discusses this. The first two come in the section, "The Obstacles to Peace"
in Chapter 19 of the text, where he states:

I am made welcome in the state
of grace, which means you have at last forgiven me. For I became
the symbol of your sin, and so I had to die instead of you....

Let me be to you the symbol of the end
of guilt, and look upon your brother as you would look on me. Forgive me
all the sins you think the Son of God committed. And in the light of your
forgiveness he will remember who he is, and forget what never was.
I ask for your forgiveness, for if you are guilty, so must I be. But if
I surmounted guilt and overcame the world, you were with me. Would you
see in me the symbol of guilt or of the end of guilt, remembering that
what I signify to you you see within yourself? (T-19.IV-A.17:1-2;
T-19.IV-B.6)

And then at the beginning of the next chapter,
in the section "Holy Week" which was written during the week preceding
Easter, Jesus returns to this important point:

You stand beside your brother,
thorns in one hand and lilies in the other [thorns and lilies are the Course's
symbols, respectively, for attack and forgiveness, crucifixion and resurrection],
uncertain which to give. Join now with me and throw away the thorns,
offering the lilies to replace them. This Easter I would have the gift
of your forgiveness offered by you to me, and returned by me to you. We
cannot be united in crucifixion and in death. Nor can the resurrection
be complete until your forgiveness rests on Christ, along with mine ....
I was a stranger and you took me in, not knowing who I was. Yet for
your gift of lilies you will know. In your forgiveness of this stranger,
alien to you and yet your ancient Friend, lies his release and your redemption
with him (T-20.I.2:6-10; 4:3-5).

Jesus has to be forgiven on two levels.
The first relates to the "bitter idols" the world has made of him, which
clearly reflects its projections and has nothing to do with him at all.
These idols have come in both special hate and love forms, where he has
either been made into a figure of judgment and punishment who demands suffering
and sacrifice of his followers, or else a magical savior who, upon petition,
will solve problems and reward good deeds and faithful discipleship with
his love and beneficence. Once again, such images reflect the specialness
needs of the image-makers, with no reference to the real Jesus at all,
who clearly is beyond such ego concerns. And so it can be seen here that
Jesus is to be forgiven for what he has never done, and even more
to the point, forgiven for what he has never been.

To the ego, Jesus is the most threatening
figure imaginable, as we have already indicated in our answers to earlier
questions, for if he is real, then the ego thought system cannot be. And
so the part of anyone's mind that still clings to specialness and individuality
-- the hallmarks of the ego thought system -- would inevitably fear, and
therefore attack Jesus to protect itself. This attack reflects the
original ego thought that the Son of God had sinfully separated himself
from the Love of God. Guilt over such attacks on Jesus -- the Western world's
greatest embodiment of this Love -- can only lead to denial. Guilt (or
self-hatred) is such an overwhelming experience that it is almost inevitably
buried in our minds. This reflects the magical belief that, like the proverbial
ostrich, if we do not see the problem, it is not there. This ego dynamic
of avoiding the pain of our guilt culminates in projecting our belief in
sin and guilt onto Jesus.

This is the meaning of the passages
quoted above from the text. Rather than our accepting responsibility for
our guilt -- which the ego teaches us must lead to death as justified punishment
for our sin -- we hope, once again magically, that by projecting the guilt
out onto Jesus, leading to his death, we will be off the hook. For the
ego would kill rather than have its existence undone. And thus two thousand
years of belief in vicarious salvation, which Christian theology espouses,
proclaims that "Jesus did it for us." This insane dynamic reflects the
ego's "bread-and-butter" dynamic of the guilt-attack cycle, wherein the
guiltier we feel, the greater is our need to attack others in "self-defense,"
which in turn reinforces the guilt which always remains repressed in our
minds. And then the cycle begins all over again. This is why Christians
have always worshiped a slain savior, and why Catholics specifically commemorate
Jesus' death by reenacting it every day at Mass. Our guilt impels us continually
to kill him off. And so what we forgive in Jesus is simply the projection
of what remains unforgiven in ourselves.

What we find here is that this first
level of forgiving Jesus for our projections onto him, is really the defense
against the underlying level which reflects our real need for forgiveness:
Jesus has to be forgiven for who he truly is. Again, if the Jesus
of reality is indeed present within our minds as the perfect embodiment
of God's Love -- the pure expression of the Holy Spirit's Atonement principle
-- then our entire identity as a separated physical and psychological being
is undone. It is truly this that we hold against Jesus. He is the
living proof within the dream of our own existence, that we are wrong and
he is right. He is the clear and unmistakable presence from outside
the dream that attests to our sleeping minds that the dream itself is unreal.
To accept this is to accept that we are truly not here, but dreaming a
dream where we made up an individual self to replace the Self that God
created. And so to preserve this made-up self, we must attack and destroy
the truth. We have already examined this idea in some depth, but
let us return to it once more by quoting some expressive lines from one
of Helen's later poems, "Stranger on the Road," which so graphically portray
this fear of confronting the truth of Jesus' existence. In effect, Jesus'
presence in our minds denies the "truth" of our own thought system of fear
and death, which in our strange insanity we believe is comforting to us
and therefore needs to be protected from him:

The road is long. I will not
lift my eyes,For fear has gripped my heart, and
fear I know --The shield that keeps me safe from
rising hope;The friend that keeps You stranger
still to me.

Why should You walk with me along the
road,An unknown whom I almost think I fearBecause You seem like someone in a
dreamOf deathlessness, when death alone
is real?

Do not disturb me now. I am contentWith death, for grief is kinder now
than hope.While there was hope I suffered. Now
I goIn certainty, for death has surely
come.

Do not disturb the ending. What is doneIs done forever. Neither hope nor tearsCan touch finality. Do not arouseThe dead. Come, Stranger, let us say
"Amen."
(The
Gifts of God, p. 103)

And so in all honesty we need to look at
how we fear and hate Jesus, feelings that are almost always buried in our
unconscious minds, under layers and layers of defenses. Through forgiving
him for who he truly is, we learn at the same time to forgive ourselves
for trying to pretend that we are not who we truly are, and then
seeking to blame him for it. Were the presence of Jesus not so explicitly
clear in A Course in Miracles, many students would not have the
opportunity of dealing with this deeply buried layer of unforgiveness and
guilt in themselves.

Reproduced with the kind permission of Gloria and
Kenneth
Wapnick and the Foundation for A Course in Miracles